Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons: 29th October 2023

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Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"

So wrote William Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice!

As ever his words have proven true. All of us can cite Scripture to back up something we approve or disapprove of, particularly if we are having a religious argument. We can be very careless too, using a text to prove something without examining and studying it properly, or in the case of those with selective memories, picking and choosing what we want to hear and use.

Too often we have heard the zealous defender of a religious faith, with a particular take on morality, draw upon scripture to attack others. For example one has only to think of the sheer volume of unpleasantness aimed at the LGBTQ community in the name of God, yet dig deeper into the source material and what we believe, is all too often found to be taken completely out of context. And this is a lesson all of us must learn, not to use Scripture for our own ends, but try to enter into the meaning of the text, and for us Christians in particular, to use the lens of Jesus as a way of understanding and interpreting what is being read or heard.

It is useful to remind ourselves of what Dei Verbum, The Dogmatic Constitution of Vatican II on Sacred Scripture encourages us to do: "However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men/women in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.(DV III. 12)

This is not the task of everybody, and we can be hugely grateful that since Vatican II our use and understanding of the Scriptures has immeasurably improved thanks to the wonderful scholarship and translations of so many biblical scholars. But do we, I mean the individual Catholic Christian, take our Scriptures seriously enough? If we find ourselves wanting in this area, then now is a good time to start, just as we prepare to begin the Church Year with Advent in a few weeks time. But remember, Scripture is a living engagement with the `Oracles of God, with the Word who is Christ, both in the Liturgy and in private prayer and reflection. The discipline of Lectio Divina, that gentle and meditative reading of the words of scripture, is a gift handed to us by the monastic tradition and something that we could usefully practise.

But why all of this today? The first reading from Exodus immediately struck me as a real admonition for our behaviour towards others both individually and as communities:

'Thus says the LORD:
"You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.
You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.
If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry'. (Ex 22: 20-22)

This particularly in the context of that desperate conflict between Israel and Hamas, with innocent people on both sides of the conflict suffering terribly, but also about our own approach to those migrants who seek asylum. I know there is no easy answer, but our task is to try and help find that way forward. So I expect that for each of us it is not pleasant to hear this kind of direct admonition from Scripture, but it needs to be taken seriously. It is a call to courage, to grow up in faith, and to learn the hardest thing about that call to love, which we hear in todays Gospel, is that 'holy Charity' sometimes requires us all to let go of hatred masquerading as justice, or of our bigotry, fear about the different other, or simply the human desire to score points, and instead become the first to hold out the hand of reconciliation and welcome.

This deep command not to wrong others comes in the middle of a whole series of do's and don'ts in Exodus, one or two of which the zealots of our own age use to attack others for being different, conveniently forgetting such gems as the one in the second portion of this first reading, which should really shake up our financial awareness and act as a conscience clause on business practices : 'If you lend money to my people, the poor among you, you must not be like a money lender; you must not demand interest from them'. (Ex 22: 24) This first reading should not make us easier in our consciences this week, but turn us back to a real examination of our inner self.

To help us, today's Gospel gives us the way to interpret our passage from Exodus, but Jesus does not let us off the hook. Aware of the traps set for him by the Pharisees and others, the simple question asked by the scholar of the Law is not so straightforward as it might seem; "Teacher,* which commandment in the law is the greatest?" (Mt 22:36) In answer Jesus gives us our own 'modus vivendi', our Gospel road: 'He said to him,* "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it:* You shall love your neighbour as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."'(Mt 22: 37-40)

This is what love is, engagement with three persons, God, our neighbour, and ourselves. And it is hard, for we spend a lifetime learning the different nuances of holy love, finding out by honest mistake and joyful risk, what it means to be a human person filled with the Spirit of God. Maybe it is time we regained a healthy sense of the different loves C S Lewis tried to explore in his book, The Four Loves, but in the context of the barbarity of war, as we have it before us at the moment across the world, and in the bigotry of our own prejudice against others, perhaps the one love we most desperately need is that of friendship, for friends if true, go the extra mile. It is this that matters, for as Jesus says we are His friends, and to be a friend of his, is to be a friend to all : "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." (Jn 15:15)

Lectio Divina

From C S Lewis

The Four Loves - Friendship

'We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.'

From St Aelred of Rievaulx

Spiritual Friendship

'We embrace very many with every affection, but yet in such a way that we do not admit them to the secrets of friendship, which consists especially in the revelation of all our confidences and plans. Whence it is that the Lord in the Gospel says: "I will not now call you servants but friends;" and then adding the reason for which they are considered worthy of the name of friend: "because all things, whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you." And in another place: "You are my friends, if you do the things that I command you." From these words, as Saint Ambrose says, "He gives the formula of friendship for us to follow: namely, that we do the will of our friend, that we disclose to our friend whatever confidences we have in our hearts, and that we be not ignorant of his confidences. Let us lay bare to him our heart and let him disclose his to us. For a friend hides nothing. If he is true, he pours forth his soul just as the Lord Jesus poured forth the mysteries of the Father." Thus speaks Ambrose. How many, therefore, do we love before whom it would be imprudent to lay bare our souls and pour out our inner hearts? Men whose age or feeling or discretion is not sufficient to bear such revelations'.